Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/44

26 in Philadelphia, which even then was a large city. His few trips for duplicating purchases of Gillingham, who did his own buying, had not left much opportunity for his clerk to become known. Williamson entered the city without a friend save his cousin, Peter Williamson, living on Pine Street, between Eighth and Ninth, opposite the Pennsylvania Hospital.

From his boyhood, he was never much of a talker, but he did a lot of thinking; and seeing that he had quarried everything of knowledge and experience that he could get at the Four Corners store, the only widening avenue of progress open to him was the road to the city, and thither he must go and find his way for himself. The law of growth in the very ground under his feet, as he walked over the fields around his home, was working in the young man's soul. He could not sit down and fold his hands, and let it die out, nor could he stifle it by allowing the thorns and thistles of procrastination and cowardice to spring up to delay him, in spite of efforts of kindly friends advising to the contrary.

From childhood his mother and father